July 2004

I'm incredibly excited to announce that Materials & Applications and BLDGBLOG have teamed up to curate an architectural film fest, as part of this year's Silver Lake Film Festival in Los Angeles. In fact, we're putting together a ton of interesting stuff; I'll be making more announcements here on BLDGBLOG soon. But part of our little sub-festival will be an entire evening full of short architectural films – so we thought we'd put out a general call to anyone with a film of their own that they might want to see screened for the adoring, semi-famous, and well-tanned crowds of southern California. The obvious caveat is that your film has to be about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment – or, at least, it has to involve architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment, and in a way that isn't just backdrop. Even more specifically, we'd love to show a whole bunch of architectural machinima, site animations, project fly-throughs, or other cinematic spaces, such as the short films generated annually by the Bartlett School of Architecture's Unit 15. (International submissions are encouraged).Need more ideas? Then check out cinematic urbanism; stop by the glass avenues of Paris 2054; or watch one of these twofilms. If that's not enough, consider reading this article by Jonathan Glancey, in which he claims that:

Less abstractly, perhaps you've just recorded a video interview with an architect or urban planner – and it's actually interesting – or you've just driven around Manhattan fifty times, filming each circuit, speeding the whole thing up till it's less than three minutes... Or whatever: we just want films about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment. There's a whole lot of leeway there.Your film has to be at least a minute long – though it can consist of multiple, smaller films, edited together – and no longer than ten minutes. It also has to be good. Finally, to be included, your film has to be submitted either to BLDGBLOG or to Materials & Applications before Friday, April 6th, 2007. Include your name; your affiliation, if you have one; the title of your film; its running length; and a short description of the actual film. We'll then go through all the submissions and choose the ones that will be featured at the festival (specific date, time, and location to be announced shortly). Pending further developments, eligible formats for submission include Region 1 DVDs (email me for my address, or just ship it to Materials & Applications) or files sent via services like YouSendIt and MegaUpload. So get cracking! Who knows who will see your film. This time next year, you could be directing X-Men 4 and flipping the bird at all the kids you went to architecture school with...

Comments are moderated.

If it's not spam, it will appear here shortly!

Think about buying my eye-opening, efficacious, avant-garde novel, thus, receiving enlightenment from inner self how to proceed in this lifelong demise (with 24/7 sadonic satir, of course). Alleluia!! I'm now a full-fledged-Loser!! I'm very proud to giveth unto thee my own version of Loserdom. If you'll follow to my URL...

I found a pretty nice short from Pleix films called Sometimes. http://www.pleix.net/films.html More of flying architecture than a building fly through, but very nicely done. The other videos are all pretty good too

Hi,I am an architect working with some well known French architects (Jean Nouvel, Christian de Portzamparc...), in order to illustrate and animate their projects. On my website www.bartproject.com, some videos. I would be interested in sending some material to the festival.Ignazio

We are currently working on a documentary about students going through their architectural thesis process.www.architorturefilm.comWe are interested in submitting a short introducing the community to our concept. We hope to increase future outreach and inspire profession/academic reaction through pre-production collaboration. Please let us know if this falls within your guidelines for the architectural film festival?We would love the chance to participate!

what should be the specs (dimension, format, quality) for the movie clip if it is submitted online for you to download? for example, is 640x480 quicktime h.264 acceptable for you to judge the clip, with a dvd submission later if it is selected for the festival?

About BLDGBLOG

BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated.